Berlin and Prague (sorry for the less than witty title)

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We left Amsterdam bright and early in the morning and had a long 8 hour ride to Berlin. Germany is absolutely beautiful though and it made for quite the scenic drive.



The language barrier was ever so present in Germany. We stopped in a little suburban town for some lunch and trying to order food was probably the most difficult experience on the trip thus far. My prior German speaking knowledge only includes no and thank you. We eventually established what we wanted to order though.

we made it to our hostel and it was my favorite place so far. The interior design was such my taste. It was very eclectic and artsy feeling with unique typography on all the signs. Like my first hostel in London this one was crawling with young backpackers and tourist which made the experience even better. There was a bar inside the hostel so after mingling there for a few hours a group of us went out and checked out what Berlin nightlife has to offer. <span>Everything is open until 5 AM in Europe. I now understand why it is such a custom to take naps here.

<span>We booked a walking tour for the city. I’m glad we decided to go that route as opposed to explore on our own. Berlin is an incredible city and probably my favorite so far. There is so much history to it because of the Nazis and WW2, but because everything was bombed and destroyed the city is still very up and coming. Very unique to experience the mixture of the two. On our walking tour we saw Brandenburg<span> Gate, Checkpoint Charlie, the Rietzteg, and a remaining point of the Berlin wall.

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What’s Germany without beer and bratwursts right?! Its only obvious that that is what we would get to eat for lunch after our tour. Once we did that trying to navigate the train system home was quite the challenge. Trying to figure out what stop to get off, transfer to, get on at was rather difficult giving that I could not pronounce ANY of the stops. We had to get off at the stop that started with a R, but there were 5 R stops. We were lucky and guessed the right one. How we managed that I’m still questioning.



We relaxed during the rest of the afternoon in the hostel and then went out and walked the east side gallery. That is a portion of the Berlin wall (on the east side, go figure) that thousands of artists painted after October of 1990. It was a mile and a half long stretch of amazing and unique artwork.



The next morning we left Berlin to head for the Czech Republic.Did I say Germany was a language barrier? Well that was until I got here. Czech takes the cake.We got to Prague after a pit stop in Dresden.

Dresden was so old and mid-evil. The architecture was old and Gothic I felt like i went back in time.



Unfortunately I was only in Dresden for a short time. I got to Prague and went into the city right away. My favorite part of the city was the John Lennon wall. There was a painting of John Lennon that appeared, and the law forbid it to be painted so it was covered up. No matter how many times it was covered it reappeared Eventually a whole wall was covered with lyrics inspired by “imagine all the people” and eventually artist designed their own work for the wall.



Another thing that was confusing was the money system. 33 crowns approximately equals 1 USD, so trying to figure out the conversion rate while buying merchandise and food was another struggle on top of the language. Unfortunately because of this merchants knew that we would not know what was an appropriate price and try to scam us. Kristina got scammed out of a watch by nearly $200 US dollars.





Early tomorrow morning we leave for Vienna I’m excited because the Spanish Riding School is there so hopefully I’ll be able to see it.

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